Physical play activity is fun for children and is an important to the physical, social, and cognitive development of a child. Benefits of physical activity include, among other things, improving physical fitness, strength, agility and coordination; and developing social and cooperative learning skills when playing with other children.
Physical activity can be designed in purposeful ways so as to achieve desired results. For example, if one desires to develop a child's physical fitness and coordination for performing specific physical movements, one could design an exercise that includes those movements. Such an exercise will be more effective if it is also fun because children are more likely to engage in fun activity more often, for longer periods of time, and with greater interest levels.
Physical exercises can be designed to achieve specific results. For example, exercise movements can be designed to develop a specific muscle group or physical ability. For example, a muscle group may be the quadriceps group, abdominal muscles group, core muscles group, biceps group, triceps group, shoulders group, back group, or any other group of muscles that are located proximal to one another or that work together.
Exercises can also be designed to achieve specific physiological results. For example, plyometric exercise (“plyometrics”) is an explosive type of exercise training designed to produce fast, powerful movements, and improve the functions of the nervous system. Plyometrics is used to increase the speed or force of muscular contractions, providing explosiveness for a variety of sport-specific activities. Benefits include injury prevention, power development and sprint performance amongst others. Plyometric movements, in which a muscle is loaded and then contracted in rapid sequence, use the strength, elasticity and innervation of muscle and surrounding tissues to jump higher, run faster, throw farther, or hit harder, depending on the desired training goal.
Calisthenics are a form of aerobic exercise consisting of a variety of simple, often rhythmic, movements. They are intended to increase body strength and flexibility with movements such as bending, jumping, swinging, twisting or kicking, using only one's body weight for resistance. Calisthenics when performed vigorously and with variety can benefit both muscular and cardiovascular fitness, in addition to improving psychomotor skills such as balance, agility and coordination.
Cardiovascular exercise is exercise that raises your heart rate, making a stronger heart and stronger cardiovascular system, and develops more capillaries, which deliver more oxygen to cells in your muscles. This enables your cells to burn more fat during both exercise and inactivity. Cardiovascular exercise uses large muscle movement over a sustained period of time.
Strength training is the use of resistance to muscular contraction to build the strength, anaerobic endurance, and size of skeletal muscles. There are many different methods of strength training, but the present invention promotes movements that use the person's body weight as the source of resistance. Strength training can provide significant functional benefits and improvement in overall health and well-being, including increased bone, muscle, tendon and ligament strength and toughness, improved joint function, reduced potential for injury, increased bone density, a temporary increase in metabolism, improved cardiac function, and elevated HDL (good) cholesterol.
Balancing exercises develop a person's ability to maintain the center of gravity of his or her body. Balancing requires concurrent processing of inputs from multiple senses, including equilibrioception (from the vestibular system), vision, and perception of pressure and proprioception (from the somatosensory system), while the motor system simultaneously controls muscle actions. The senses must detect changes of body position with respect to the base.
Stretching is a form of physical exercise in which a specific skeletal muscle (or muscle group) is deliberately elongated. Stretching exercises increase flexibility and athletic performance and reduce injury. Yoga involves the stretching of major muscle groups.
Educational exercises and activities designed specifically for cognitive and social skill development can be combined with or incorporated into fun physical activities, thus creating a hybrid physical/educational activity. Children may be more likely to engage in the educational activity when it is part of such a hybrid activity, particularly when the hybrid activity is perceived by the child predominantly as a fun physical play activity.
Children are also more likely to engage in activities that they can do independently of adult involvement.
There are many traditional children's games, such as Duck, Duck, Goose, Musical Chairs, Hopscotch and Ring around the Rosy, that are fun for children, provide physical activity, social interaction, and may provide limited cognitive challenges such as counting. However, these games are limited in the cognitive challenges and physical exercises that they can provide. These games are not designed to teach or employ targeted physical movements to develop targeted physical abilities, and do not incorporate methods or apparatus adapted to instruct such movements. There is a need for an improved educational children's play set that provides children from three to six years of age with different cognitive challenges, while simultaneously engaging them in exercise and cooperative play that involves isolated body movements designed to exercise and develop specific muscle groups and specific physical abilities. There is a need for such an improved play set that is also self-instructive of new body movements, that can be used by young children with minimal adult intervention, and that uses visual indicia that are simple for young children to understand.